Narrative

In Praise of Poetry

I had my first real encounter with grief when I was twenty years old. Soul-smothering, temper-animating, phone-smashing grief. Born as I was a pastor’s daughter, I sought comfort first from the Body of Christ, that great host of believers, a vast holy throng who one by one appeared as a nail-pierced hand in my face. Between these moments, as I raged and I prayed, I turned my lonely mind to the Christ Himself. He was (contrary to the songs and my earnest hope) not enough. Not much of anything, in fact, though I couldn’t admit this then.

It was around the same time that I had my first real encounter with poetry. e.e. cummings came first, then Wendell Berry and Walt Whitman and John Donne, later Sarah Kay and Andrea Gibson and Naomi Shihab Nye. Marilyn Nelson and Ross Gay. Jane Hirshfield and John O’Donohue and Gregory Orr and Tracy K. Smith and W.H. Auden. Somewhere in there I began writing poems myself, and in them finding my own secrets, words I didn’t know needed saying. Meanwhile, faith as I knew it was still wrapped in its shroud as the third day came and went and the stone never rolled away. My eyes had been set perpetually heavenward, but as the poets spoke, I turned my attention to the world around me and realized it was beautiful.

When I came to the poems of Mary Oliver, I was changed indelibly. I remember where I was, sitting at a small round table in a white and wooden Pasadena coffee shop, when I read “Swan” for the first time:

Did you too see it, drifting, all night on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air,
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings: a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
a shrill dark music, like the rain pelting the trees,
  like a waterfall
knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds—
a white cross streaming across the sky, its feet
like black leaves, its wings like the stretching light
  of the river?
And did you feel it, in your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed your life? (2010, p. 15)

It was then, there in that black river, I was baptized as a poet. I emerged from its waters a new soul, turning to poems as scripture. To the earth they hymn as spirit, as life. Poems, both their reading and their writing, became my ritual, my prayer. Yes, in praise of poetry, I am devout.

A Poet's Practice

I live in contradiction. I am the queer, Jewish daughter of a pastor. A loquacious, autistic writer who was without words to describe my own world until I received my diagnosis at 33. I seek stillness constantly, with a yearning that buzzes, hums like static, shudders like labor pain. I ache for simplicity, for quiet, for calm. I find myself existing ever in tension.

Tension is a distinctly human experience, as far as we know. Poetry is, for me, the language of making peace with it. I am moved to write a poem by dread and tenacity, tiny grey squirrels in the jaws of neighborhood cats, their mothers hungry at our feeder the next day. I am moved by the busy, quiet lives of solitary bees, how carefully they take from the earth, how generously they give back. I am moved by our 106-year-old floors, scarred and creaking, lovely, foreboding. By my son waking in the night, crying until I drag my heavy, glad body from sleep to hold him. By nature’s divinity, and its mortality. And yours. And mine.

If I am a poet, I am most a poet in this space. Leaning against my wife as we fall asleep, praising her closeness; pressing tortillas in a cluttered kitchen; delighting to celebrate our child’s second birthday, knowing we won’t be there for his eightieth. There will always be a leaving, won’t there? I planted climbing roses, and I sometimes wonder who will tend to them when I forsake this house for another. If they’ll even bother. Even so, for the holidays, I asked for new pruning gloves. This is my home today. I should bless it with kindness, water, care. I bless my life, then, with poetry.

Poetry is not just art. Unless you go looking, however, the conversation seldom goes beyond that. I think that’s a shame. We are seeing the arts devalued in very tangible ways lately, with humanities budgets being cut around the country, scholarship opportunities for students of the arts waning, English departments dwindling, as though poetry was a luxury used up by generations past.

But poetry contains worlds of value. It is so much more than wordplay, descriptions and insights, clever turns of phrase used as social media marketing. Poetry, if really examined, is discovered to be language, syntax and cadence, phonetics and rhythm. It is also history, situated firmly in its moment. It is justice movements and picket lines. It, like history, can be cruel and complicated. Poetry is music, balance, communication. It is folklore and storytelling. If a poet writes about the natural world, it is science. It is tides and pollination, stars and bone.

Poetry is also an education in being. It requires attention, articulation. Equally, it requires knowing how and when to be quiet.

To leave space for a breath.

Poetry is craft, and it is instinct. As Mary Oliver wrote, “Everyone knows that poets are born and not made in school… Something that is essential can’t be taught; it can only be given, or earned, or formulated in a manner too mysterious to be picked apart and redesigned for the next person.” And yet, she said, “Whatever can’t be taught, there is a great deal that can, and must, be learned” (1994, p. 1). Poetry is openness and revision and curiosity. It is tenacity, because these things come to each of us imperfectly. It is a sharp and dedicated presence to the moment, and it is a lifelong commitment to staying soft to this world, however terrible it may at times be.

When we approach a poem, whether as its reader or its writer, whether it is a natural outpouring or a difficult exercise, it may offer us any or all of this. What an invaluable teacher.

I have been writing poetry professionally for nine years now. For all the startling changes these years have brought, my love for poetry is steady. It has only enrooted, expanded, grown tall and full. Now I am eager to evolve, to be challenged as a writer, to become more skillful with language (and with silence, too). I write often, read often, and am preparing to seek an MFA in poetry. As someone who considers this my vocation, I am very deliberate about my development.

But as someone who considers poetry my heart-work, I tend to my growth most seriously, with tenderness and patience. I’m not one for journaling, really, and I’ve never been much of a storyteller. Poetry is my language. It is legacy. These are the words I will leave behind.

I think of my son. I imagine that eightieth birthday, his old-man face beaming and wrinkled, surrounded by people he loves. I hope I make it there somehow, though I know my body will have gone back to the earth. Perhaps in a book on his shelf, words on his tongue. Perhaps as a poem tucked snug in his memory, just waiting to drag its heavy, glad body from sleep to hold him.

The Poetry of Work

When it came to work, it took me a long time to find my feet. I have labored over the years as a barista, a touring musician, a social worker, a day-to-day manager, a volunteer coordinator, an artist, a tutor. When I was 19, I was the “worst employee Jamba Juice has ever had.” I drove rich kids to fancy lessons and nannied for a trio of autistic siblings who were very dear to me. I was (I wish this was a joke) volunteer staff at one exploitative organization. They kept the hope of employment dangling, and in the meantime I worked full-time for nothing, organizing their events and taking out their trash and struggling to pay my bills. I could’ve gotten a stipend for music directing at a little church in Grand Rapids, except I was unwilling to convert to Wesleyanism. I was a dedicated student. I was a four-time dropout.

That I get to now work as a poet was either fluke or fate. I was writing often because I found, when my mouth got all clogged with the words I couldn’t say aloud, poetry gave me language. So when the opportunities came, the poems were there, I will grant myself that. I was ready.

But I did not expect the influx of readers to come when I started sharing my poems, which I’d turned into handwritten art and posted to social media. I posted them for myself and my friends. The shift began when Brené Brown (yes, the Brené Brown) shared some of my posts. Soon came the followers, then the readers, then the requests to purchase my poems. Before I knew it, I was running a small business selling art prints and writing custom poetry for people all over the world. I’ve collaborated with filmmakers, songwriters, actors, television executives, authors, and composers. I’ve written for births and funerals and so much in between. This is what I’ve done for nearly a decade.

It's a funny thing, working in words. So often it is deeply independent work, dreamed up in my quiet mind, actualized in early morning hours, before even my two-year-old wakes. I sit in the silence and write. But a poem, to paraphrase Jane Hirshfield, finds its completion in the reader. She says, “a poem is nothing unless it is completed with all of the ingredients of the human heart and soul and spirit and language knowledge and the history that is embedded in every word” (2021). A poem, then, isolated as its genesis may be, is inherently collaborative. This understanding imbues me with a sense of responsibility to write excellently, thoughtfully, craftfully.

I wrote for my own spirit long before writing became my work. I will continue to write if I’m never read again. It’s in my marrow. I am a writer. But of course I want to be read. I want to deserve being read. As grateful as I am to have built a kind of grassroots career, I also aspire to more. Over the years, I’ve grown curious about authorship, editing, and educating, so opted to return to school in order that I might crack some of those doors open.

I am bothered by the structural gatekeeping. My repeated early departures from school had absolutely everything to do with my then-undiagnosed autism (a condition I am all but certain would have been named in childhood if I had been a boy). I was overwhelmed by unclear expectations and unspoken social-emotional demands. I struggled to stay engaged with studies I was pressured to pursue in subjects I couldn’t force myself to care about. I am a driven learner, but for reasons I could not yet understand, I kept losing steam.

The systemic exclusion of those of us who often struggle in classroom settings—because we struggle in classroom settings—is an inequity I feel in my chest. If it was only to bypass the doorman by waving a degree in his face, I’m not sure I’d have found the impetus to return. But after self-educating for nine years, I realized I was eager to be stretched by those with a particular quality of experience. The challenge and instruction of academia called to me.

Returning to higher education after a decade away, felt, at first, humiliating. It was a reminder of what I had tried and failed to accomplish before. Telling people I had gone back to school felt like undermining my own reputation with those who, reading my work, assumed I was already done with all that. (I hear how it sounds to say this.) The other side of that coin was becoming someone’s inspiration. Returning to school as a mother, in my thirties, with a recent autism diagnosis… Wow! For someone who has spent a lifetime trying and failing to blend in, this too felt humiliating. It highlighted all the ways in which I was exceptional—literally, an exception. It is just as alienating as its alternative.

As I settled into my education, however, I discovered something that burns like a warm, steady sun in the middle of me—the understanding that I am not an apology to be made. My trajectory is my own. It is an entirely reasonable alternative for someone like me (and indeed, for anyone). I reengaged as a student endowed with language to describe my experience and self-advocate, which alone is transformative. But I also reengaged with proficiency and an understanding of where I was trying to go. These things reshaped the work entirely.

But in this self-acceptance, I found something even more vital: dissent. It should not be so much harder for some of us to find a seat at the proverbial table. And we should not have to feel the pangs of shame and isolation for necessarily taking a longer time to get there.

My experience returning to school grew in me a passion, not just for the work I do, which I love, but for participating justly in my field. I’ve experienced this, to borrow from Joni, from both sides now (1969). I have been buoyed by teaching that has illuminated new ideas and challenged weak ones, that has held space and empowered and enriched. I’ve also been buoyed by frustration, by discord. For example, when my selective mutism interfered with an assigned presentation, I had to build an alternative project for myself from the ground up, without any substantive support. I had to discuss this project with my classmates, so I had to make the uncomfortable decision between publicly disclosing my accommodations or misrepresenting what I was working on. This tension pulls me deeper into care for the work I do and will do.

As I work toward my degree and look ahead to grad school, I recognize the privilege I will have when I finish. Whether I take the path into editing or education, I will be in a position to hold the door open. I want to validate alternative timelines, listen to softer voices, and work creatively to affirm and amplify those of us whose trajectories could never have been anything but our own. It is not uncommon to struggle in institutional settings, and I would like to see this both normalized and changed.

In the meantime, I do what I can. I work. I mother. I observe. I light candles on Friday evenings and allow myself to rest. I study. I speak. I listen. I notice.

I write.

IMAGE CREDITS:
Photos by Torri Blue unless otherwise indicated.